How The Future Looked In 1899

Looking back on the events of the 20th century, the economist John Bates Clark could scarcely count his blessings. War and poverty had been eliminated, of course. Electricity and aerial navigation had transformed the daily grind into a cornucopia of earthly delights. What once were slums were now "abodes of happiness and health," enlivened with parks and playgrounds many stories in height. Things were moving on up. Admittedly, there'd been a few iffy patches, like when the state of Saskatchewan, fired up by some hot-blooded New Zealanders, tried to draw the continent down the path of communism. But in all, as Clark saw it, the century had been a nearly pothole-free expressway of progress, which saw "Society take its present shape from one that was as far below it as a tree-climbing ape is inferior to a cultured man."

Such a vision! Here was a reckoning of the 20th century as it could be seen only from--well, from 1902, when The Atlantic Monthly published Clark's mock retrospective of the coming era. To Clark and other prognosticators of a hundred years ago, the future promised a technological idyll of pearly ease and prosperity--not to mention a lot of really cool gadgets. By the year 2000, they predicted, humanity would have it made in the electric shade. There'd be strawberries the size of apples, peas the size of beets, oranges blossoming in the tropics of Philadelphia, predicted John Elfreth Watkins Jr. in the December 1900 issue of The Ladies' Home Journal. Moving sidewalks and pneumatic tubes would whoosh people and stuff around the metropolis; the letters c, x and q would be abandoned in the name of that voguish pursuit, efficiency.

Like all predictions, those of a hundred years past tell as much about their own era as about the one to come. Writing in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the futurists placed their faith not just in big technology but in the march of bigness itself. "The age of power and conquest," wrote the historian and educator John Clark Ridpath, "shall yield to an age of glory and enlightenment. Aluminum will be the shining symbol of that age... The houses and cities of men, built of aluminum, shall flash in the rising sun with surpassing brilliance." Most wondrous, wrote Watkins, our homes would be connected to networks of cameras and telephones, allowing us to see around the world from the comfort of our living rooms. Who knew that before the next century was over, Al Gore would have invented just such a network?

To run the electronic Eden, the visionaries predicted a benevolent bureaucracy on an unprecedented scale--bigger, even, than the great trusts of the time, and nicer to boot. Society would scrunch the very rich and very poor classes toward the bulging middle, wrote Sidney G. Brock, who ran the Bureau of Statistics in Benjamin Harrison's Treasury Department. "Wealth undoubtedly will be much more evenly distributed," with the comely effect that "the vice of intemperance will largely cease."

Of the three minds whose ideas were to rock the century to come, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud focused on the past. Karl Marx was the futurist. His manifesto, published in 1848, created the template of a centrally controlled new world order that future prognosticators played off--with optimism at the turn of the century, with horror by the time of George Orwell's "1984." H. G. Wells, in a 1901 series of essays published in The North American Review, anticipated a global New Republic governed by "a new class of intelligent and scientifically educated men." As Lenin flirted with the Marxists of 1890s St. Petersburg, the American reformer Mary E. Lease ventured matter-of-factly that 100 years hence, "railroads, the channels of communication, light, water, and all public improvements will be managed by the state, in the interest of the people, and owned by the general government."

Among the heralds of this brave new world, the hits were as noteworthy as the misses. The economist Van Buren Denslow predicted that as women came to control society's purse strings, men would primp and preen in sexy tights--a daring conjecture that found its philosophical echo, if not its full sartorial realization, in Susan Faludi's 1999 formulation of a male "ornamental culture" in "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man." On the other hand, Denslow also predicted that America's crowning metropolis at the millennium would be either Denver or Salt Lake City. Most futurists missed the medical advances of the 20th century--it had been more than 100 years since the development of the smallpox vaccine, and the coming wave of miracles was just out of sight. Likewise, few foresaw the dominion of the car. In a series of 74 essays commissioned by the American Press Association, only one mentioned the automobile, or "electrical carriage." Flying machines, however, abounded. (A surprising dissenter: Wells, who pooh-poohed the prospect of aeronautics, arguing that "man is not... an albatross, but a land biped.")

Instead, futurists tended to leap on the developments of their immediate present, extrapolating them into the future. New York's first skyscraper, the 13-story Tower Building, had gone up in 1888, an open invitation to imagine a future played out along its vertical, rather than horizontal, axis. How pityingly Clark looked back on the New York whose "streets were only one story high." He celebrated a city of many-tiered sidewalks, streets, walkways and parks rising up into the sky. Trains would rush at speeds of 150 miles per hour; mechanical devices would reduce house- and farm work to the push of a button; hot and cold air, wrote Watkins, would flow from spigots to keep every home comfy.

Others simply imagined that the technologies then restricted to big corporations or governments would go mass market--the PC revolution, 80 years before its time. Guglielmo Marconi invented the wireless in 1895, for example. By 1906 the illustrator Lewis Baumer drew a future couple sitting at opposite ends of Hyde Park, huge aerials sticking up from their hats to receive racing results or pitch the woo. As the great shipping lines consolidated, Clark imagined the seas of tomorrow teeming with "passenger vessels so vast as to seem like floating cities." Carnival Cruise Lines, were you listening?

In the end, what is most telling about the projections is not their acuity but their underlying optimism. In 1792 the French revolutionary Francois-Noel Babeuf, looking forward to the world of 100 years thence, predicted a society without strife, poverty or injustice. Two centuries later, hip-hop futurist Afrika Bambaa-taa translated such sentiments into his own succinct terms. "The pressure's gotta stop," he opined; "the future's gotta rock." Hope, as they say, springs until the break of dawn. So as you raise a glass to the new year, be not afraid to set your sights high. Tonight, go on and party like it's 2999.